the Complexion Connexion

Free Sofware developers -- in their daily focus -- are commited to making the software GOOD. Free Software companies -- according to their own moral imparative -- are commited to making the software
USEFUL.

That the two objectives don't wholly overlap is a source of frisson
between Free Software individuals and the Free Software's corporate
sponsors. Maybe this is healthy in itself, or an opportunity waiting to
be leveraged.

Perhpas it's time for the Free Software community as a whole to
think about the role and value that Free Software companies bring to
the ecosystem.

"Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation,
requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people,
and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and
understand their needs."

This is a veiled criticism of Free Software. He's talking about his software business -- where he often conflates software technology assembly
with the organization of people in his business dedicated to solving
customers' problems and making alternatives look unattractive.

The quote is difficult to fault as a business statement, since they
have proven adept at doing the whole package. But it doesn't account
for the superior code produced by both isolated and collaborative work
across the Free Software ecosystem.

Mr Gates visualizes the Free Software developer -- the Hobbyist, for whom his distain is on record -- as an anti-social being (see in section, "Non-Assertion of Patents Pledge," the definition of "
Non-Compensated Individual Hobbyist Developer"),
having long hair, bad breath and working alone in a garret. He can't be
entirely wrong because he was a software hobbyist, himself, back in the
1970s -- closely fitting that description.

Free Software doesn't actually suffer from a lack of collaboration
on the code. It suffers in the market-place -- that bazaar of products
-- from an almost comprehensive lack of collaboration with business.

A few years ago, I thought it was an embarrassment that the
bellwether GNU/Linux company, Red Hat, had only passed the $100-million
total revenue mark. Given the size of the enterprise and consumer
software markets, that number was just ... well, embarrassing.

Just this week, we read with a mixture of amusement, glee and ennui
that Novell, having got its reporting methods checked off by the SEC,
reported 4th Quarter revenue from Open Platform Solutions (which
includes Linux) at $23 million, up 69% versus the year-ago quarter.

Even though Novell's Linuxinvoicings (something different
than accounting revenues) were up 108% in the period, suggesting an
annualized Linux billing-rate well beyond $100 million, it is fairly
depressing that the company with the very best enterprise GNU/Linux
desktop, plus some good identity, messaging and deployment/management
products makes as much money in one Quarter as Microsoft makes in a few
minutes.

Evidently, GNU/Linux's enterprise penetration today is so minimal
that it is hard sometimes to see why Microsoft bothers to oppose it.
(Or is it attributable to the monopoly's effectiveness in opposition?)
This means that GNU/Linux does not have a depth or breadth of
conversations under weigh with corporate IT departments -- the
innovative, feedback kind of conversations that Mr Gates rightly prizes.

How is this going to change if not slowly? Progress seems glacial
today in light of the Free Software community's apparent and general
disinterest in business and willingness to abuse
sincere, if controversial, efforts to compete. The small amount of
business in the commercial Free Software space makes it hard to attract
bright people. The space seems incompatible with innovation. (I'm not
convinced it's merely due to monopoly conditions.)

Experience working and solving enterprise customers' problems breeds
experience. Solutions as well as sales, deployment & integration
knowledge improve in a cumulative way.

I wrote last year in the Financial Times about the more prominent GNU/Linux migration case studies
in Europe: the Gendarmes, Munich and PSA Peugeot Citroen. PSA is a
Novell customer and the migration of 40% of that car company's desktops
to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is a pivotal case for Novell and
for the GNU/Linux desktop in general.

Christophe Therry, Novell general manager for France, explained:
"Peugeot was impressed with the translucent 3D desktop, with the
user-interface functionality and was looking for a way to facilitate
the path through the user-adoption curve."

Peugeot is a Lotus
Notes and SAP house; these enterprise applications must integrate
seamlessly. Peugeot and Novell convinced IBM to port Lotus Notes to
Linux (which IBM had no prior intention of doing), and this was
accomplished for Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 in just two
months. (IBM and Novell are now cross-marketing Notes 8 on Novell's
SLED 10 Linux desktop.) Novell was able to feed back Peugeot's
requirements into SLED 10, for which Mr Therry credits Peugeot's
culture.

Working together they improved SLED 10's wireless
security making it possible, for example, for a laptop's connection to
move from one domain server to another while maintaining security.

They
improved Linux's ability to integrate securely in a Windows
environment; and added coding improvements to the Firefox browser on
Linux which make it possible for the internal websites to conform to
the exotic requirements of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser when
such pages are viewed on any platform.

Some
Free Software developers -- perhaps those operating from their garrets
-- may ask, "Why do we need to commercialize Linux? It's fine as it is.
It solves all my problems!" It's a fair question, for which
we need a fair answer. Even Linus Torvalds has commented about
virtualization, for example, 'I don't care ... I'm just not that
interested in it.' We are glad they are so focused on the problems that
are important to them; it has made the software GOOD.

Yet PSA Peugeot Citroen represents the kind of enterprise engagement
that is not only healthy for GNU/Linux but essential to making it USEFUL.
Through the engagement, key customer-recommended features get added or
adjusted within the software, and the collaboration with the end user
helps Novell address problems of integration or of interoperability
that are outside the GNU/Linux code-base (and therefore not typically
identified as problems). Thanks to the quality and the efficiency of
developer collaboration around the GNU/Linux code, the inside work on GNU/Linux is so advanced today that it is largely these outside problems which present the more significant obstacles to adoption.

Mr Gates is right about software innovation, but he's the wrong
person to say it. Enterprise engagement by commercial Free Software
companies is critical if GNU/Linux is to be useful as well as good. And
we need more of it.